Event Temporal Relation Extraction (ETRE) is paramount but challenging. Within a discourse, event pairs are situated at different distances or the so-called proximity bands. The temporal ordering communicated about event pairs where at more remote (i.e., ``long'') or less remote (i.e., ``short'') proximity bands are encoded differently. SOTA models have tended to perform well on events situated at either short or long proximity bands, but not both. Nonetheless, real-world, natural texts contain all types of temporal event-pairs. In this paper, we present MulCo: Distilling Multi-Scale Knowledge via Contrastive Learning, a knowledge co-distillation approach that shares knowledge across multiple event pair proximity bands to improve performance on all types of temporal datasets. Our experimental results show that MulCo successfully integrates linguistic cues pertaining to temporal reasoning across both short and long proximity bands and achieves new state-of-the-art results on several ETRE benchmark datasets.
Distilling Large Language Models for Efficient Clinical Information Extraction
Poolesville High School（普尔斯维尔高中）；University of California Santa Cruz（加州大学圣克鲁兹分校）；Stanford University School of Medicine（斯坦福大学医学院）；Clinical Excellence Research Center（临床卓越研究中心）；Stanford Health Care（斯坦福医疗保健系统）
University Medical Center Utrecht（乌得勒支大学医学中心）；KU Leuven（鲁汶大学）
Time is deeply woven into how people perceive, and communicate about the world. Almost unconsciously, we provide our language utterances with temporal cues, like verb tenses, and we can hardly produce sentences without such cues. Extracting temporal cues from text, and constructing a global temporal view about the order of described events is a major challenge of automatic natural language understanding. Temporal reasoning, the process of combining different temporal cues into a coherent temporal view, plays a central role in temporal information extraction. This article presents a comprehensi…
Learn from A Rationalist: Distilling Intermediate Interpretable Rationales
Department of Computing Science, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada（阿尔伯塔大学计算机科学系，加拿大埃德蒙顿）；Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute, Edmonton, Canada（阿尔伯塔机器智能研究所，加拿大埃德蒙顿）
University of California, San Diego（加利福尼亚大学圣迭戈分校）；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；National Taiwan University（国立台湾大学）
Temporal information extraction plays a critical role in natural language understanding. Previous systems have incorporated advanced neural language models and have successfully enhanced the accuracy of temporal information extraction tasks. However, these systems have two major shortcomings. First, they fail to make use of the two-sided nature of temporal relations in prediction. Second, they involve non-parallelizable pipelines in inference process that bring little performance gain. To this end, we propose a novel temporal information extraction model based on deep biaffine attention to ext…
University of Southern California（南加州大学）；University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
We propose a joint event and temporal relation extraction model with shared representation learning and structured prediction. The proposed method has two advantages over existing work. First, it improves event representation by allowing the event and relation modules to share the same contextualized embeddings and neural representation learner. Second, it avoids error propagation in the conventional pipeline systems by leveraging structured inference and learning methods to assign both the event labels and the temporal relation labels jointly. Experiments show that the proposed method can imp…
A principal barrier to training temporal relation extraction models in new domains is the lack of varied, high quality examples and the challenge of collecting more. We present a method of automatically collecting distantly-supervised examples of temporal relations. We scrape and automatically label event pairs where the temporal relations are made explicit in text, then mask out those explicit cues, forcing a model trained on this data to learn other signals. We demonstrate that a pre-trained Transformer model is able to transfer from the weakly labeled examples to human-annotated benchmarks …
University of California, Los Angeles（加州大学洛杉矶分校）；University of Southern California（南加州大学）
There has been a steady need in the medical community to precisely extract the temporal relations between clinical events. In particular, temporal information can facilitate a variety of downstream applications such as case report retrieval and medical question answering. Existing methods either require expensive feature engineering or are incapable of modeling the global relational dependencies among the events. In this paper, we propose a novel method, Clinical Temporal ReLation Exaction with Probabilistic Soft Logic Regularization and Global Inference (CTRL-PG) to tackle the problem at the …
University of Warwick（华威大学）；King’s College London（伦敦国王学院）；The Alan Turing Institute（艾伦·图灵研究所）
Existing models to extract temporal relations between events lack a principled method to incorporate external knowledge. In this study, we introduce Bayesian-Trans, a Bayesian learning-based method that models the temporal relation representations as latent variables and infers their values via Bayesian inference and translational functions. Compared to conventional neural approaches, instead of performing point estimation to find the best set parameters, the proposed model infers the parameters' posterior distribution directly, enhancing the model's capability to encode and express uncertaint…
Analysing zero-shot temporal relation extraction on clinical notes using temporal consistency
Faculty of Computer Science, University of Vienna（维也纳大学计算机科学学院）；UniVie Doctoral School Computer Science（维也纳大学计算机博士学院）；Aarhus University（奥胡斯大学）；Faculty of Philological and Cultural Studies, University of Vienna（维也纳大学语言与文化学院）
Identifying temporal relations between events is an essential step towards natural language understanding. However, the temporal relation between two events in a story depends on, and is often dictated by, relations among other events. Consequently, effectively identifying temporal relations between events is a challenging problem even for human annotators. This paper suggests that it is important to take these dependencies into account while learning to identify these relations and proposes a structured learning approach to address this challenge. As a byproduct, this provides a new perspecti…
Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California（南加州大学信息科学研究所）；Department of Computer Science, University of Southern California（南加州大学计算机科学系）；Department of Computer Science, University of California, Los Angeles（加州大学洛杉矶分校计算机科学系）
Extracting event temporal relations is a critical task for information extraction and plays an important role in natural language understanding. Prior systems leverage deep learning and pre-trained language models to improve the performance of the task. However, these systems often suffer from two short-comings: 1) when performing maximum a posteriori (MAP) inference based on neural models, previous systems only used structured knowledge that are assumed to be absolutely correct, i.e., hard constraints; 2) biased predictions on dominant temporal relations when training with a limited amount of…
It is commonly acknowledged that temporal expression extractors are important components of larger natural language processing systems like information retrieval and question answering systems. Extraction and normalization of temporal expressions in Turkish has not been given attention so far except the extraction of some date and time expressions within the course of named entity recognition. As TimeML is the current standard of temporal expression and event annotation in natural language texts, in this paper, we present an analysis of temporal expressions in Turkish based on the related Time…
Siemens AG（西门子股份公司）；University of Munich (LMU)（慕尼黑大学（LMU））
Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Relation Extraction (RE) are essential tools in distilling knowledge from biomedical literature. This paper presents our findings from participating in BioNLP Shared Tasks 2019. We addressed Named Entity Recognition including nested entities extraction, Entity Normalization and Relation Extraction. Our proposed approach of Named Entities can be generalized to different languages and we have shown it's effectiveness for English and Spanish text. We investigated linguistic features, hybrid loss including ranking and Conditional Random Fields (CRF), multi-task o…
Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur（印度理工学院克勒格布尔分校）；IBM Research AI（IBM人工智能研究院）
Knowledge Base Question Answering (KBQA) systems have the goal of answering complex natural language questions by reasoning over relevant facts retrieved from Knowledge Bases (KB). One of the major challenges faced by these systems is their inability to retrieve all relevant facts due to factors such as incomplete KB and entity/relation linking errors. In this paper, we address this particular challenge for systems handling a specific category of questions called temporal questions, where answer derivation involve reasoning over facts asserting point/intervals of time for various events. We pr…
Distilling a Modular Reservoir Through a Genomic Bottleneck
Department of Computer Science, University of Tübingen（图宾根大学计算机科学系）；Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics（生物感知研究所）；Flowers Team Inria（Inria花朵团队）；Human and Machine Cognition Lab, Center for Cognitive Science, TU Darmstadt（人类与机器认知实验室，认知科学中心，图恩大学）；Department of Bioengineering, Imperial College London（帝国理工学院生物工程系）
University of Trento（特伦托大学）；Università degli Studi di Trento（特伦托大学）
Structured information resulting from temporal information processing is crucial for a variety of natural language processing tasks, for instance to generate timeline summarization of events from news documents, or to answer temporal/causal-related questions about some events. In this thesis we present a framework for an integrated temporal and causal relation extraction system. We first develop a robust extraction component for each type of relations, i.e. temporal order and causality. We then combine the two extraction components into an integrated relation extraction system, CATENA---CAusal…
University of Southern California（南加州大学）；Information Sciences Institute（信息科学研究所）
Learning causal and temporal relationships between events is an important step towards deeper story and commonsense understanding. Though there are abundant datasets annotated with event relations for story comprehension, many have no empirical results associated with them. In this work, we establish strong baselines for event temporal relation extraction on two under-explored story narrative datasets: Richer Event Description (RED) and Causal and Temporal Relation Scheme (CaTeRS). To the best of our knowledge, these are the first results reported on these two datasets. We demonstrate that neu…
Arizona State University（亚利桑那州立大学）；The University of Texas Health Science Center（德克萨斯大学健康科学中心）
Background: Identifying relationships between clinical events and temporal expressions is a key challenge in meaningfully analyzing clinical text for use in advanced AI applications. While previous studies exist, the state-of-the-art performance has significant room for improvement. Methods: We studied several variants of BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations using Transformers) some involving clinical domain customization and the others involving improved architecture and/or training strategies. We evaluated these methods using a direct temporal relations dataset which is a semantically…
UPenn（宾夕法尼亚大学）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）；USC（南加州大学）
In this paper, we seek to improve the faithfulness of TempRel extraction models from two perspectives. The first perspective is to extract genuinely based on contextual description. To achieve this, we propose to conduct counterfactual analysis to attenuate the effects of two significant types of training biases: the event trigger bias and the frequent label bias. We also add tense information into event representations to explicitly place an emphasis on the contextual description. The second perspective is to provide proper uncertainty estimation and abstain from extraction when no relation i…
Textual patterns (e.g., Country's president Person) are specified and/or generated for extracting factual information from unstructured data. Pattern-based information extraction methods have been recognized for their efficiency and transferability. However, not every pattern is reliable: A major challenge is to derive the most complete and accurate facts from diverse and sometimes conflicting extractions. In this work, we propose a probabilistic graphical model which formulates fact extraction in a generative process. It automatically infers true facts and pattern reliability without any supe…
University of Rochester（罗切斯特大学）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）
We present a novel semantic framework for modeling temporal relations and event durations that maps pairs of events to real-valued scales. We use this framework to construct the largest temporal relations dataset to date, covering the entirety of the Universal Dependencies English Web Treebank. We use this dataset to train models for jointly predicting fine-grained temporal relations and event durations. We report strong results on our data and show the efficacy of a transfer-learning approach for predicting categorical relations.
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）
Annotating temporal relations (TempRel) between events described in natural language is known to be labor intensive, partly because the total number of TempRels is quadratic in the number of events. As a result, only a small number of documents are typically annotated, limiting the coverage of various lexical/semantic phenomena. In order to improve existing approaches, one possibility is to make use of the readily available, partially annotated data (P as in partial) that cover more documents. However, missing annotations in P are known to hurt, rather than help, existing systems. This work is…
College of Computer and Data Science, Fuzhou University（福州大学计算机与数据科学学院）
In recent years, some traffic information prediction methods have been proposed to provide the precise information of travel time, vehicle speed, and traffic flow for highways. However, big errors may be obtained by these methods for urban roads or the alternative roads of highways. Therefore, this study proposes a travel time prediction method based on convolutional neural networks to extract important factors for the improvement of traffic information prediction. In practical experimental environments, the travel time records of No. 5 Highway and the alternative roads of its were collected a…
Automatic extraction of temporal relations between event pairs is an important task for several natural language processing applications such as Question Answering, Information Extraction, and Summarization. Since most existing methods are supervised and require large corpora, which for many languages do not exist, we have concentrated our efforts to reduce the need for annotated data as much as possible. This paper presents two different algorithms towards this goal. The first algorithm is a weakly supervised machine learning approach for classification of temporal relations between events. I…
University of California, San Diego（加利福尼亚大学圣迭戈分校）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；National Taiwan University（台湾大学）
Extracting temporal relations among events from unstructured text has extensive applications, such as temporal reasoning and question answering. While it is difficult, recent development of Neural-symbolic methods has shown promising results on solving similar tasks. Current temporal relation extraction methods usually suffer from limited expressivity and inconsistent relation inference. For example, in TimeML annotations, the concept of intersection is absent. Additionally, current methods do not guarantee the consistency among the predicted annotations. In this work, we propose SMARTER, a ne…
We submitted two systems to the SemEval-2016 Task 12: Clinical TempEval challenge, participating in Phase 1, where we identified text spans of time and event expressions in clinical notes and Phase 2, where we predicted a relation between an event and its parent document creation time. For temporal entity extraction, we find that a joint inference-based approach using structured prediction outperforms a vanilla recurrent neural network that incorporates word embeddings trained on a variety of large clinical document sets. For document creation time relations, we find that a combination of date…
Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California（南加州大学信息科学研究所）
We propose a novel deep structured learning framework for event temporal relation extraction. The model consists of 1) a recurrent neural network (RNN) to learn scoring functions for pair-wise relations, and 2) a structured support vector machine (SSVM) to make joint predictions. The neural network automatically learns representations that account for long-term contexts to provide robust features for the structured model, while the SSVM incorporates domain knowledge such as transitive closure of temporal relations as constraints to make better globally consistent decisions. By jointly training…
Understanding natural language involves recognizing how multiple event mentions structurally and temporally interact with each other. In this process, one can induce event complexes that organize multi-granular events with temporal order and membership relations interweaving among them. Due to the lack of jointly labeled data for these relational phenomena and the restriction on the structures they articulate, we propose a joint constrained learning framework for modeling event-event relations. Specifically, the framework enforces logical constraints within and across multiple temporal and sub…
Andalusian Institute of Data Science and Computational Intelligence（安达卢西亚数据科学与计算智能研究所）；University of Granada（格拉纳达大学）；Repsol Technology Lab（雷普索尔技术实验室）
The combination of convolutional and recurrent neural networks is a promising framework that allows the extraction of high-quality spatio-temporal features together with its temporal dependencies, which is key for time series prediction problems such as forecasting, classification or anomaly detection, amongst others. In this paper, the TSFEDL library is introduced. It compiles 20 state-of-the-art methods for both time series feature extraction and prediction, employing convolutional and recurrent deep neural networks for its use in several data mining tasks. The library is built upon a set of…
Only One Relation Possible? Modeling the Ambiguity in Event Temporal Relation Extraction
Wangxuan Institute of Computer Technology, Peking University（北京大学王选计算机研究所）；School of Intelligence Science and Technology, Peking University（北京大学智能科学与技术学院）
Schema-Driven Information Extraction from Heterogeneous Tables
College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院计算学院）；School of Computer Science and Engineering, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem（耶路撒冷希伯来大学计算机科学与工程学院）；Artificial Intelligence Center, SRI International（SRI国际人工智能中心）；Department of Computer Science, Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学计算机科学系）
Hallucination-Resistant Relation Extraction via Dependency-Aware Sentence Simplification and Two-tiered Hierarchical Refinement
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；University of California San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）；Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）
In this paper, we propose to use a set of simple, uniform in architecture LSTM-based models to recover different kinds of temporal relations from text. Using the shortest dependency path between entities as input, the same architecture is used to extract intra-sentence, cross-sentence, and document creation time relations. A "double-checking" technique reverses entity pairs in classification, boosting the recall of positive cases and reducing misclassifications between opposite classes. An efficient pruning algorithm resolves conflicts globally. Evaluated on QA-TempEval (SemEval2015 Task 5), o…
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）
Determining temporal relations (e.g., before or after) between events has been a challenging natural language understanding task, partly due to the difficulty to generate large amounts of high-quality training data. Consequently, neural approaches have not been widely used on it, or showed only moderate improvements. This paper proposes a new neural system that achieves about 10% absolute improvement in accuracy over the previous best system (25% error reduction) on two benchmark datasets. The proposed system is trained on the state-of-the-art MATRES dataset and applies contextualized word emb…
tieval: An Evaluation Framework for Temporal Information Extraction Systems
INESC TEC（INESC TEC（葡萄牙系统与计算机工程研究所））；University of Porto（波尔图大学）；Polytechnic Institute of Tomar（托马尔理工学院）；Ci2 - Smart Cities Research Center（Ci2智慧城市研究中心）
University of California, Los Angeles（加州大学洛杉矶分校）；University of Southern California（南加州大学）；Texas A&M University（德克萨斯A&M大学）
We present EventPlus, a temporal event understanding pipeline that integrates various state-of-the-art event understanding components including event trigger and type detection, event argument detection, event duration and temporal relation extraction. Event information, especially event temporal knowledge, is a type of common sense knowledge that helps people understand how stories evolve and provides predictive hints for future events. EventPlus as the first comprehensive temporal event understanding pipeline provides a convenient tool for users to quickly obtain annotations about events and…
TemPrompt: Multi-Task Prompt Learning for Temporal Relation Extraction in RAG-based Crowdsourcing Systems
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）；National University of Defense Technology（中国人民解放军国防科技大学）；Zhejiang Lab（之江实验室）；School of Artificial Intelligence, Anhui University（安徽大学人工智能学院）；University of Macau（澳门大学）；Faculty of Innovation Engineering, Macau University of Science and Technology（澳门科技大学创新工程学院）
More than Classification: A Unified Framework for Event Temporal Relation Extraction
Wangxuan Institute of Computer Technology, Peking University（北京大学王选计算机研究所）；School of Intelligence Science and Technology, Peking University（北京大学智能科学与技术学院）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；Center for Data Science, Peking University（北京大学数据科学中心）；National Key Laboratory of General Artificial Intelligence（通用人工智能全国重点实验室）
Segment Any Point Cloud Sequences by Distilling Vision Foundation Models
Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）
BNRist（北京国家信息科学与技术研究中心）；Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University（西交利物浦大学）；Renmin University of China（中国人民大学）；THU-Siemens Ltd., China Joint Research Center for Industrial Intelligence and IoT（清华-西门子中国工业智能与物联网联合研究中心）；Tencent Inc（腾讯公司）；Shenzhen International Graduate School（深圳国际研究生院）；Institute for AI Industry Research (AIR), Tsinghua University（清华大学人工智能产业研究院（AIR））
The diverse relationships among real-world events, including coreference, temporal, causal, and subevent relations, are fundamental to understanding natural languages. However, two drawbacks of existing datasets limit event relation extraction (ERE) tasks: (1) Small scale. Due to the annotation complexity, the data scale of existing datasets is limited, which cannot well train and evaluate data-hungry models. (2) Absence of unified annotation. Different types of event relations naturally interact with each other, but existing datasets only cover limited relation types at once, which prevents m…
State of the art research for date-time entity extraction from text is task agnostic. Consequently, while the methods proposed in literature perform well for generic date-time extraction from texts, they don't fare as well on task specific date-time entity extraction where only a subset of the date-time entities present in the text are pertinent to solving the task. Furthermore, some tasks require identifying negation constraints associated with the date-time entities to correctly reason over time. We showcase a novel model for extracting task-specific date-time entities along with their negat…
